Chapter VI: Part 6

And Eloise felt her fetters close miserably upon her. This had been his device to know if he had dreamed or not on the night before, to detect whether his joy were solid truth or mounting laudanum-fumes. But as for Vane, so soon as his bow was made and homage paid, he fled away round the corner and lost himself in Hazel's happy arms.

At dinner that day the ladies rose early, as they were to dress for a wedding-party that awaited them some miles away. Just as Eloise, who was the last, passed out of the door which Mr. St. George held open, he produced from somewhere and placed in her hand a braided trencher of broad vine and fig-leaves that bore a mass of strange and beautiful growth. Scarcely had she plunged taper fingers between the scented layers, when a box with Mr. Marlboro's compliments was delivered, which, on being laughingly opened, proved to hold rare wreaths of pinky buds and bells.

"Four gray walls and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers,"

hummed Lottie; but Mr. St. George was consummately oblivious, and returned to his friends. Why it fell out, that, when Miss Changarnier came floating down the staircase again, robed in something thin, white, and glittering as the hoar-frost itself, the darkness of her hair was twined neither with the roseate Marlboro' bells, nor yet with the long acacia-sprays whose golden balls should have expanded and bloomed in the light and heat till they seemed like fragrant drops of lustre, Miss Changarnier could best tell for herself.

But the wedding passed as weddings do,--to-day cake, to-morrow crumbs,--and at length the carriages were ordered for The Rim. The evening had not been without its triumphs to Eloise, however many masks she wore over her inner depression. St. George had forgotten her till a late hour, and, conspicuous as Marlboro's _devoir_ had been, her own acceptance of it had been scarcely less so. Perhaps there was nothing in the world, of its kind, more beautiful than Eloise Changarnier's dancing. Fragrances, if they were visible, would float with just such a dreamy grace from flower to flower. Simple and sensuous, yet airy and fine, was the spirit of every motion; and with every wave, with every look, she appealed to the beholder's heart. Swimming down the room on the slow circles of the indolent languor of the waltz, perfumes fanning all about her, the wind lifting the curtains and letting in gleams of amethyst heavens and low-hanging stars, the music pulsing in passionate throbs,--once only she raised her eyes, and the great beryl jewels rested on Earl St. George Erne's, as he leaned against the wall with his supreme indifference of lordly manner; and if he revenged himself with the swift gleam of that involuntary smile that must never kindle for her, though it shot its light over brow and lip forever, he never knew it. An instant afterwards he was beside her, yet he dared not with the next strain suffer it to be his arm that upheld her, and Eloise sat where he placed her and danced no more. And then Mrs. Murray came, and they all took their seats in the carriages: Laura jubilant, but stately; Lottie eminently dishevelled, and still clutching the crumpled list of her partners; Master Will with his fists in his eyes, and heavy beneath a drowsiness from which he soon had enough to waken him; while in Mr. St. George's deportment to every one there was a shade of the old sardonic displeasure with which he was occasionally wont to favor his friends. But Lottie, after a few furlongs, was asleep in somebody's arms; the rest were, perhaps, living the evening over again in reverie; the other carriages were far, far ahead, and theirs, which, having been detained, was the last, trundled on slowly over a bad road. At length Laura stirred, and exclaimed,--

"Did you ever hear such divine music, Eloise? Why didn't Mrs. Arles come, do you know, Mr. Marlboro'?"

"Does Mrs. Arles go into such general society?" replied Mr. Marlboro'.

"Can't say. How long she wore black! so long that it has really become quite gray! Has she been husbanding her charms, or is she husbanding them now? Don't you shake your fan at me, Eloise Changarnier, or I shall tell how you said it yourself this very noon!"

The carriage-top had been thrown open, and at the moment of these words Miss Changarnier saw Mr. St. George, from his seat on the box beside the coachman, hastily start and turn, but whether on account of Mrs. Arles, or at something in the road, she could not discern; for Marlboro's horse having very singularly fallen lame in the stables that night, she had heard Mr. St. George muttering something about foul play, as he offered the other a seat, and she felt that he entertained apprehensions. Had she seen Marlboro's arm raised quiveringly, while the lash of the riding-whip fell across the groom's face in a welt, as he dismissed him, she might have felt also a womanly fear that the apprehensions were not groundless. For Marlboro', unable to get speech with Eloise one moment apart from others that day, had fled home in a fury, and had thus, when his anger cooled, been obliged to ride alone to the place of merry rendezvous.

Gradually, now, as they jogged along, Mrs. Murray began nodding here and there about the carriage, dropping her head very much as if she meant to drop it for good and all; one by one the others forgot themselves; but Eloise could see Marlboro' in the opposite corner sitting alert and pale and sparkling-eyed, and felt that Mr. St. George was watching every brier on the road-side, beneath his slouching brim. At length the carriage stopped with a jerk just as they reached the little log-bridge that crossed the creek, and Mr. St. George appeared at the door.

"You must all alight a moment," he said. "Here is a break-down;--and, moreover, a log of the bridge has been displaced,"--the last in an aside to Marlboro'.

It took but a few moments to repair the road, and to tie up the broken springs of the coach as they could; but, after a trial, it was found impossible for all to ride.

"I will walk," said Eloise, stepping down before any one could arrest her. "We were all too much crowded. Come with me, Will,--if only, Mr. St. George, you will take the reins yourself and spare Ned to us?"

"No," said Mr. St. George, perhaps knowing from old experience that it would be useless to oppose Eloise, and having no time to lose. "Keep your place, Will; do you hear? The horses are best used to the customary driver. That makes it all right."

"Certainly, St. George, this should be my duty!" exclaimed Marlboro'.

But, as he sprang up, Mr. St. George's arm barred the way.

"You have quite enough to do to take care of yourself, Marlboro'!" said he, thrusting his revolver into the other's hand. "Drive on, Ned. Only keep us in sight."

"Mas'r Sin George, Sah," said the stolid Ned, "you are safe enough. Expect, 'f you want _him_ safe," with supreme contempt, "I'd better get de go out o' dese yer critters wile dey feel der oats!"

"Wretched insolence!" murmured Marlboro', still incensed. And in a few minutes the coach had disappeared round the winding way.

"So much for Marlboro's theories!" burst forth St. George, in a moment. "A man's works follow him. Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind is too much of a good thing. He has been away so long and so often, there has been such mismanagement under a long minority, such changes and such misrule, such a hard hand and such a high hand, that the whole place is a fester. How dares he prowl round the country so after nightfall? I wouldn't give a pin for his life this moment, if it weren't for that white defiance of his that would back him against a whole Ashantee tribe! If he were the coward that I am, he'd be a better master; but he's what the poor trash call a damned aristocrat,--which means an aristocrat past salvation, I take it."

Eloise laughed to hear the words from Mr. St. George's autocratic lips. "It is very odd," said she, "that so formidable an aristocracy must needs underlie so powerful a democracy!"

The night was clear and deep; great shadows floated down from the heavens, as if of beings travelling on the winds: one of those perfect seasons when the powers of the dark seem to be surprised at their work, although low in the horizon behind lay a glimmer, as if the hour were soon to bring forth its marvel,--a glimmer which made the whole more weird, and hung the very spirit of summer nights about them as they walked.

"What should you have thought of yourself, Miss Eloise," said Mr. St. George, "if a year ago, you had seen your image prospected on the canvas of a dark and lonely highway, extremely late at night, or early in the morning,--as you choose,--with, for sole companion, a creature who indulges himself in pipes, porter, and parties, a usurper, a demagogue,--in fact, one who can be represented only as disreputable? A very improper young woman?"

One year ago! The tears sprang to Eloise's eyes. She dared not look up, but let them fall from the downcast lashes. Yet Mr. St. George saw them.

"And what is there, so painful in the picture, may I ask?" said he.

"A year ago my father was alive, Mr. St. George."

A change came over his face,--pallor like a soft cloud.

"Yet you are better off than I," he said, with singular unreserve for him. "It is twelve times as long since _my_ father was with _me_. And you could hardly have worshipped the one more than I worship the memory of the other."

Yet, as if this at least were a sympathy between them, his manner became for the moment tenderer, and he forgot himself in order to arouse her. For Eloise was already full of reproach at having made one at so gay a reunion,--not remembering that all the rest had seriously vowed they would stay at home, unless she joined them, and that the wedding had been also that of a dear friend. So Mr. St. George was no longer lofty; he told her strange legends of the region that somehow she had never heard, repeated tiny droplets of song that would have lost their volatile essence in any alembic of translation, pointed out to her all the signs of the night, for the nonce forgot politics, and gathered spray after spray of the gorgeous creepers from the way-side, whose names and natures he knew.

"How is it," she asked, "that you, whose mind is certainly filled with things of an apparently vaster scale,--with legislation and war and finance,--can care for these bubbles, these songs and flowers?"

"Do you know Homer, Miss Eloise,--Chapman's Homer? Although I'm not sure but that the old English poet breathes a bloom upon the Greek. Well, I do not forget, that, when the envoys went to appease the enraged AEacides, that thunderer in arms,--

"The quarter of the Myrmidons they reached, and found him set
Delighted with his solemn harp, which curiously was fret
With works conceited through the verge; the bawdrick that embraced
His lofty neck was silver twist; this, when his hand laid waste
Aetion's city, he did choose as his especial prize,
And, loving sacred music well, made it his exercise."

"That is superb! You must find me the place to-morrow. But Achilles playing on the harp? I am afraid he will suffer in Will Murray's estimation."

"Hush! don't breathe it! Will doesn't know it yet,--perhaps may never find it out. Do you know, Miss Eloise, as you go flitting along in that misty dress, with the little scarf dropping from your hair, that you are like the very soul of a white cloud fallen from above and trailing along beside me?"

"I? with my dark skin?" said Eloise, before she thought.

"Yes, you, Egypt! White, because there combine all colors that are; and in you--pardon me--there is a universal wealth of tint, be it carnation, sea-green, black, or cream, so harmonized that one looks a hundred times before finding it all. You recollect how a great painter produces his effect of white,--of white sunlight on a stem? He lays the solar spectrum there, the seven colors of light,--and their union in the beholder's eye makes the dash of sunshine, the white lustre. Do you know, in fact, what you remind me of?"

"No,--how should I?--Hark! what was that?"

It was the pealing of a bell, the far and faint pulsation of that bell she had once before heard, as it rang out the changes of the sea, now above and now below the flashing, falling foam-crests.

"It is the tide-bell," said Mr. St. George, stiffly; and, with the word, the previous midnight rose as if by incantation, and she kept her eyes on the ground. Yet, as they walked, it seemed to Eloise that her quickened senses detected a hidden rustle and murmur, as if the distant morasses, the neighboring thickets, were alive. She seemed to be aware of soft and stealthy soundless foot-falls; shadowy forms, she would have said, were gliding around them in the night. Cold terror made her heart stand still. Suddenly all these fears condensed into shape,--two flaming eyeballs glared in the copse,--a shock, a flash, a smell of powder, just as she had seized Mr. St. George's arm and snatched him back. Then the boughs crashed, and the dark shade went leaping away. Terror died in Eloise's heart. Intrepid rage possessed her. She sprang forward, still holding him back with the continued gesture of the light hand on his arm, and gazed over the bushes, the very incarnation of splendid fearlessness and defiance. Mr. St. George laughed.

"Is there nothing that excites your indignation?" she cried. "Could you not have throttled him?"

"A flash in the pan," said he, coolly. "However, it might have been worse. It has blown a breeze through my _sombrero_,"--taking off the hat, which the ball had partly twisted around. "It was meant for Marlboro', Miss Changarnier. I am in his place to-night, you see. You have misled the rascals. Listen!" he murmured, in a lower tone, beside her. "There is a freemasonry among these black devils,--doubtless the tide-bell signals some secret meeting. They are all about us. Here! you are the last person to be seen. Take this, and hurry on while I wait; you can walk fast. Go!"

And the handle of a knife, a great broad blade, produced from some hidden sheath, was between her fingers.

But Eloise did not stir.

"Go!" he repeated, in the same smothered murmur.

"Place you in such danger? Leave you so?" said Eloise. "Never!"

"Do as I bid you!" he replied, in a tone as full of cold, unsuppressed bitterness as a north wind, motioning her away, and moving back.

The moon behind him, as he stepped, was floating up from the horizon, a great bubble of glory, whitening the tops of the whole dark landscape, throwing out in glittering points, like frosted silver-work, the rimy, dewy tracery of budding boughs, studding each twig with gems, and pouring light into the high hollow heaven, like vast draughts shed crystal-clear from some shining drinking-horn. When, then, Mr. St. George mounted the stump by the way-side and stood there erect, weaponless and with folded arms, the moonlight upslanted full on face and form, and made him as distinctly and rigidly visible to all the low land on either side the road as if he had been some statue set up for a mile-stone. A little time he remained so. A night-hawk slowly wheeled from a distant grove, and came dreamily sailing high above his head. There was an instant's flare that revealed a group of dusky faces in the swamp below, a report, and the night-hawk plunged downwards and fell at his feet.

"Mas'r Sin George," cried a voice, grim with murder ten minutes since, "we lebe you our card. Good night!"

Mr. St. George stood there a moment and watched the group till it faded off from sight in the shadows of that distant cypress-grove, and then stepped down and found Eloise with clasped hands exactly where he had left her.

"Why didn't you obey?" he said,--but this time with what a different voice! "You could not feel your danger! You did not know your risk! Great God, Eloise"----

Mr. St. George silenced himself abruptly.

"Well," he continued, after a few paces, "I convinced the wretches of my identity. It is quite like life in the Romagna, an hour with the brigands of the Marches, is it not? It is pleasant to play the hero for five minutes. But you! They know Marlboro' can be hurt through you. Truth runs in subtle channels here. Come, hasten! By God! if I had such people as Marlboro's, I _would_ sell them, and that with a tan-toasting!--or I'd send them all to the North, that's so fond of them! Come, hasten!"--and, half dragging her on his arm, he strode forward, wordless and fierce, till they reached the house.

I do not know what thoughts whirled through Eloise's dreamless brain during the rest of that night, nor with what half-trembling resolutions she arose, nor how much pride she had drowned in a vaster flood. But when she descended, she found the house ablaze with fearful rumors that had risen like marsh-lights everywhere out of the ground. All was not right at Blue Bluffs, they said; some escaping slave--perhaps the compunctious Vane himself, who knew?--had dared to breathe of great disturbance and of retaliatory examples during the week before, which, seen in the light of last night's broken bridge and gunshots, struck up fresh terror. At noon Marlboro' came, but only for a brief stay. There had been trouble with the creatures on his place, he said, contemptuously, owing to some conspiracy among them, suspicions and punishments. He could not account for such a state of affairs, unless through incendiary emissaries. If further punishments were found necessary, they should be just within the letter of the law, he vowed in an angry aside to Mr. Humphreys,--the thing must now be settled once for all. He would be here again on the next day, no new occurrence detaining him at home, he said, as calmly as if that covered nothing; and with his fair hair shining in the sun, and the handsome Vandyck-face laughing over the shoulder, he rode off in gay heart and knightly guise, accompanied by Evan Murray and Earl St. George Erne.

They were all standing on the piazza that night, looking for Mr. St. George's return ere going to bed. A sudden toll, and then a sharp, quick ringing, broken by other tolls, burst the air close above them.

It was the alarm-bell, and Ned the saturnine, rebellious in reason and loyal in love, stood at the wheel. Mr. Murray, the father, leaped away. Mr. Humphreys drew his brood within-doors. There was mustering of weapons, shrieking of children; Miss Houghton fell in hysterics; Mrs. Arles brought her the camphor, as quietly as she would have done at any other time; Miss Changarnier stood like the expiatory victim for the white race. Then came runners, overseers galloped up the avenue, gentlemen, crackers, and leashed blood-hounds. There followed hurried words and counter-commands; then part remained, part dashed away on the road to Blue Bluffs. Nobody thought of sleeping; in the dead of night the dull tramp of infantry resounded from the distant turnpike, and later they heard the clang of grounding arms, and by the faint morning light they saw the forms of the silent sentries stalking stalwart about them, while, all around, the Erne slaves pursued, some their usual routine, some the steps of the moment's master or mistress, and others watched, huddled into frightened groups. Eloise stood leaning against one side of the long drawing-room window; without knowing it, her fingers constantly closed around the knife that lay in her belt, and which she had failed to restore to its owner. All night she kept her motionless position, looking far out and away to the eastward, till the dark mass of Blue Bluffs should resolve itself into the azure mist of castellated height that by daylight ever loomed upon the sea-horizon.

Hours of suspense and of silence. At length, hurriedly resounding hoofs, and St. George once more stood among them.

"A revolt at Blue Bluffs," said he.

"As I have expected every night this month," said Mr. Dean.

"They have captured the ringleaders?" demanded Mrs. Arles.

"What have they done with them?" cried Emma Houghton.

Every one paused.

"Never mind," said Mr. St. George, with a terrible hiatus.

"And where is Mr. Marlboro'?"

"Where should you expect a man to be who crowds down the steam and sits on the valve,--who walks on crater-crust? Marlboro',--poor Marlboro'!--Marlboro' is dead."

Eloise dropped in a heap upon the floor.

The women gathered over her and got her away, laid at last upon her bed,--and then she ordered them all to leave her, which glad enough were they to do.

Mr. St. George walked the room in silence then, and finally sitting down and resting his elbows on the table, remained so a long time,--his knotted brow hidden by the tightly clasped hands. Nobody got any further information from him. They must wait till Evan Murray returned with the officers from the forts. Then he rose.

"You are in no danger here," he said to Mr. Murray. "There is a guard detailed for every adjacent plantation. The affair is altogether crushed.--I must go just the same," he muttered, and entered his cabinet alone.

It was about two hours afterward, that Eloise--with whom, after having roused herself from the horror of the shock, a feeling of unspeakable pity, awe, and quaking terror had merged in another of equally indescribable and cruel relief and freedom--was wakened from the dull dream that sogged upon her brain in answering the place of two nights' lost rest, by a servant at the door who brought to her a note. All confused at the instant of starting, suddenly memory struck out the late events in letters of fire. Half awake, with her pulse beating in great shocks all about her wherever a pulse could play, she tore the note open and read its but half-interpretable hieroglyphs twice before she comprehended it.

"Distasteful as the thought of me may be at such a time, you
must endure it for a moment.

"I return to you to-day the property of which many months
ago I despoiled you. I leave it in better condition than I
found it, and so well has it met my demands, that, in spite
of all expenditure, you will find the customary income for
the length of time in the cabinet-escritoire untouched.

"I leave it because it becomes impossible for me to retain
it. I leave it because it becomes impossible for me to live
longer in the house with you, to breathe the air you
breathe, to feel myself growing desperate beneath the sound
of your voice. Because I cannot see you in sorrow for
another. Because self-control can go no farther. I leave it,
Eloise, because I love you!

"If I cherished one hope, it would not be at this time that
I should tell you my deadly secret. I have none, and
therefore I go.

"EARL ST. GEORGE ERNE."

A sickly thrill of something like disgust swept over Eloise as she read, that one could think of anything but the great horrid fact of the hour. Then she trembled from head to foot, and hid her face with shame and sobs. "What does it mean?" she cried. "'At such a time'? What time? Oh! he thinks--can he think?--I love Marlboro'! Will no one keep him? Is he gone? He leaves because he loves me? Why, if he loves me, I should think he would stay! Oh, is it true? is it true? St. George, St. George, do you love me?" Hurriedly she smoothed her hair while she exclaimed, threw over her shoulders the scarf of blue and silver hanging across the mirror, and ran down.

Mr. St. George had that moment left, saying he was absolutely obliged to depart, but that he hoped his guests would remain the guests of Miss Changarnier. His luggage was to be sent after him.

"Which way had he gone? towards Blue Bluffs?"

"No, the other way."

Eloise summoned Vane and Hazel to follow her, and, flashing out of the house, went rapidly down the mazes of the woody avenue, over the fields, to the nearest place where the road crossed the creek. If Mr. St. George was on the winding highway, by taking this straight cut she would reach the creek even before his galloping horse could do so. At length she paused, stationed Hazel and Vane behind her,--busy enough in themselves, for Hazel, become happy again, had again become coquette,--and went on alone. There had been a heavy shower that morning; Eloise stooped and examined the clayey path that led up from the creek, to see if footprints had lately been set there, and found nothing. The minutes dragged away like hours, and when thirty elapsed, she wondered why it was not growing dark. "He has not come this way!" she exclaimed. "He is gone! I never shall know where he is!"--and she threw herself down among the wild, rich growth that half rose and buried her. Gradually, when her fever of sobs had died away, a sound broke on her ear, the sound of a slow, steady tramp. Was it the beating of her heart?--or was it Earl St. George? It drew nearer; she dared not rise and see. She heard the splash of the feet in the water, in the intense light within her brain could seem to see the dark water strike up and break in showers of prisms. Then the feet left it, and came up the bank. Should she dare? If she delayed--Suddenly that apparition tangled in the blue and silver scarf rose and confronted Mr. St. George.

The horse knew her, as he swerved, then bent to rub his cheek on her shoulder; Rounce, who, from stopping to plant his nose deep in every rose upon his way, had just rushed up breathless, knew her too, and fell to frolicking about her feet. She stood with both her arms about the horse's bending neck, with her face half drooping there, and the black, falling tress curving forward on the cheek.

"I never loved him!" was what she murmured. "I never meant to marry him!"

"Miss Changarnier!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, dismounting, thinking, perhaps, that trouble made her wild. "Here? To-day? Alone? You must return at once!"

"I never, never will return, unless you take me back!" she said, raising her head, but not daring to raise her quivering glance.

"Eloise! Eloise! Do you know what you say?"

She ventured just a glimpse at the dark eyes above her, glowing and glooming, smiles breaking out of their pain, and then with a little blind motion the tender face was hidden in his breast.

Just there a cloud peeled off the sun and went all radiant upon its way, the silent birds fell into one deep chorus, the locust shot out its great whirring lance of jubilant sound, the whole forest grew astir and alive over the glad secret it had learned.

The sun was setting, when Mr. St. George, leading his horse, on whose back Eloise was throned, and followed by Hazel and Vane, came into view of the wondering, waiting, indignant party on the piazza. The party, fickle as any mob, be it patrician or plebeian, was easily appeased with such quarry as it found, and changed itself straightway with acclaim into a bridal party. That night St. George brought in and tried upon the third finger of the white left-hand a narrow glittering band.

"Nothing but a wedding-fetter?" he asked. "Yet capable of great things, that fetter! It holds the famous elixir which sinks two identities in one; it is the visible sign of a sacrament; it is to be the type of our souls' union, pure, perfect, and without end"----

But here, perhaps, the eyes of Eloise silenced him, perhaps the mouth. And when life settled in its new channel at The Rim, Eloise, wearing at last her father's name, sat at the head of her husband's table, and Mrs. Earl St. George Erne herself entertained her guests. They lingered a little while, with the disinclination that any group finds to separate, and circumstances had knitted a bond among them all. And then, when deepening summer ended the renewed cheer, Mrs. Arles put on her widow's-cap once more, her little foot went into obscurity, and the gold and ebony riding-whip hung reclaimed above her mantel.

WATCHING.

In childhood's season fair,
On many a balmy, moonless summer night,
While wheeled the light-house arms of dark and bright
Far through the humid air,--

How patient have I been,
Sitting alone, a happy little maid,
Waiting to see, cheery and unafraid,
My father's boat come in,--

Close to the water's edge
Holding a tiny spark, that he might steer
(So dangerous the landing far and near)
Safe past the ragged ledge!

No fears had I, not one.
The wild, wide waste of water leagues around
Washed ceaselessly, there was no human sound,
And I was all alone.

But Nature was so kind!
Like a dear friend I loved the loneliness;
My heart rose glad, as at some sweet caress,
When passed the wandering wind.

Yet it was joy to hear
From out the darkness sounds grow clear at last,
Of rattling rowlocks, and of creaking mast,
And voices drawing near.

"Is't thou, dear father? Say!"
What well-known shout resounded in reply,
As loomed the tall sail, smitten suddenly
With the great light-house ray!

I will be patient now,
Dear Heavenly Father, waiting here for Thee!
I know the darkness holds Thee! Shall I be
Afraid, when it is Thou?

On Thy eternal shore,
In pauses, when Life's tide is at its prime,
I hear the everlasting rote of Time
Beating forevermore!

Shall I not, then, rejoice?
Oh, never lost or sad should child of Thine
Sit weeping, fearing lest there come no sign,
No whisper of Thy voice!

ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON.

After our return from the Yo-Semite Valley, Bierstadt and myself remained in San Francisco, or its delightful neighborhood, making short excursions around and across the bay, for more than a fortnight. But this lotus-eating life soon palled. We burned to see the giant Shasta, and grew thirsty for the eternal snows of the Cascade Peaks still farther north. So much of a horseback-ride to the Columbia as brought us into Oregon I here propose to sketch in brief.

The rest of our party had become sated with travel and gone home. One glorious September day we took our saddle-bags, note-books, and color-boxes, put our horses on board the Sacramento steamer, and, without other baggage or company of any sort, set out for the Columbia River and Vancouver's Island.

At Sacramento, on the next morning after leaving San Francisco, we shifted our quarters to a smaller and light-draught boat which was to take us up the shallow river to its head of navigation. This arrangement was a great economy of time. The country bordering the Upper Sacramento for two hundred miles from the Californian capital is level and comparatively tame, so that no artistic advantage would have resulted from following the bank on horseback. From the little steamer the view became a perpetual pleasure. About twenty miles above Sacramento we passed the mouth of Feather River, disgorging coffee-colored mud from the innumerable gold-diggings along its course, and came into lovely blue water, pure as the cradling snow-ridges between which it issued. The immediate margin began to be thickly wooded with overhanging willows, oaks, and sycamores. These were alive with birds of every aquatic description. The shag, a large fowl of black and dingy-white plumage, apparently belonging to the cormorant family, peopled every dead tree with a live fruit whose weight nearly cracked its branches; every snag projecting from the river-bed was studded with a row of the same creatures at mathematically equal intervals, each possessing just room enough for his favorite pastime of slowly opening his wings to the utmost, and then shutting them again in solemn rhythm, like a pupil of Dr. Dio Lewis's or a patient in the Swedish Movement-Cure. The quiet embayed pools and eddies swarmed with ducks; every sunny bar or level beach was a stalking-ground for stately cranes, both white and sand-hill; and garrulous crows kept the air lively, in company with big California magpies, above our heads.

The course of the river grew more and more sinuous as we ascended; it was near the close of the dry season, and there remained none of those cut-offs which economize distance during the prevalence of the rains. The Upper Sacramento, especially when softened and rendered illusory by such a full moon as it was our good-fortune to travel under, perpetually recalls that loveliest of fairy streams, the higher St. John's, in Florida. Nothing out of dreams is more peacefully enchanting than the embowered stretches of clear water rippled into silver arabesque through a long moonlight night, or the hazy vistas, impurpled by twilight, into which one swings around the short curves of the Sacramento, amid a silence that would be absolute but for his own motion, while beyond either woody margin the great plains spread away untenanted, a waving wilderness of wild grass and _tule_.

Enjoying the _far-niente_ of a life of such sweet monotone all the more because it was such a contrast to our rough riding past and future, we spent two golden days, as many mezzotint twilights, and a pair of silver nights upon our steamer. On the morning of the third day we reached Tehama, a dead-and-alive little settlement, seven hours' journey by the river-windings from Red Bluffs, the head of navigation, but only ten miles by land. We had now got in sight of mountains; the ethereal blue of Lassen's Buttes, rimmed with the opal of perpetual snow, bounded our view northerly; and as every motive for taking to the saddle now consisted with our desire for economizing time, we here began our horseback-ride, reaching Red Bluffs several hours before the steamer.

Just out of Tehama we struck into a country whose features reminded us of the wooded tracts between Stockton and Mariposa. After two days of _tule_ and wild grass, Nature grew suddenly ennobled in our eyes by thick and frequent groves of the royal California oak. There was a feeling of luxury in the change, which none can know who have not had a surfeit of boundless plains. We bathed our hearts and heads in shadow; the fever of unbroken light went out of us; our very horses shared in the relief, and gave themselves up to a sweet somnambulism with which we had too much sympathy to break it by spurs.

Red Bluffs we found a place of more apparent stir and enterprise than any Californian town we had seen, except San Francisco and Sacramento. There was quite a New-England air about the main street,--so much so that I have forgotten to call it _Plaza_, as I ought. This place is the starting-point for all overland supplies sent between the Sacramento and Portland. Immense wagons--shaped like the Eastern charcoal-vehicle, but dwarfing it into insignificance by a size not much inferior to that of a Mississippi flat-boat--are perpetually leaving the town, drawn by twelve mules or horses, and in charge of drivers whose magnificent isolation has individualized them to a degree not exceeded in the most characteristic coachman of the Weller tribe, or the typical skipper of the Yankee fishing-smack. There are few finer places to study _genre_ than the California ranches frequented by the captains of these "prairie-schooners." At convenient distances for noon halts and nightly turnings-in, the main freighting-roads of the State are adorned with gigantic caravanseras offering every accommodation for man and beast, provided with arcades straddling nearly across the road, under which all passing wagoners not only may, but must, shelter themselves from the rigors of rain or sun, and billeted along their fronts with seductive descriptions of the paradise within, to which few hearts prove obdurate after being softened by the compulsory magnanimity of the arcade.

In time there must be a railroad all the way from Sacramento to Portland. There is not a mile of the distance between Red Bluffs and the Oregon metropolis where it is not greatly needed already. Nearly the whole intervening region is exhaustlessly fertile,--one of the finest fruit-countries in the world,--but so entirely without an economical avenue for its supplies or outlet for its productions, that many of the ranchmen who have settled in it feel despondent in the midst of abundance, and leave hundreds of magnificent orchard-acres paved with rotting apples which would command a "bit" a pound in the San-Francisco market, if the freight did not more than consume the profit, and the length of the journey render the fruit unsalable.

The first day out from Tehama we made a distance of nearly forty miles,--part of the way through oak-groves and part over fine breezy plains, with the noble mountain-chain out of which Lassen's Buttes rise into the perpetual-snow region continually in sight on the right hand. The only incident that occurred to us this day, in any other key than that of pure sensuous delight in the fact of life and motion under such a spotless sky and in an air that was such breathable elixir, together with the artistic happiness which flowed down on us from the noble neighboring mountains, was our discovery early in the afternoon of a cloud of dust about half a mile ahead, with the forms of a hundred horsemen dimly looming through it. Such a sight sets an old overlander instinctively fumbling at his holsters; fresh as we were from the horrors of the desert, we felt our scalps begin to detach themselves slightly from the cranium. But we rode straight ahead, as our only method of safety was to wear a bold front, if the cavaliers were, as we half suspected, a party of Humboldt Indians who had lately taken the warpath between Lassen's Buttes and the coast. I don't recollect ever having been better pleased with the look of Uncle Sam's cavalry-uniform than we were, upon coming up with the squad and finding it a detachment of our own men sent out to chastise the savages.

That night we reached a ranch called the "American,"--and certainly its title was none too ambitious, for it had the whole horizon to itself, and to all appearance might have been the only house on the continent. It was a place unvisited of fresh meat and ignorant of gridirons; but we were tired enough, after the first day of our return to the saddle, to sleep soundly in a bed of tea-tray dimensions, and under what appeared to be a casual selection from a hamper of soiled pocket-handkerchiefs, when we had despatched the first of that long series of suppers on fried pork and green-serpentine saleratus-biscuits which stretched between us and the northern edge of Oregon.

Though the month was September, the heat in the middle of the day upon the broad rolling plains we now had to traverse was as oppressive as an Eastern July. During our whole horseback-journey, therefore, we made it our custom to rise as soon after dawn as possible, breakfast, travel a stage of fifteen or twenty miles, make a long mid-day halt in some pleasant nook, and push on twenty miles farther before we unsaddled for the night. We were just now enabled to make this second stage the most leisurely and the longest of the two,--for the moon was still in all the glory of its California brightness and plenitude, and to have travelled by moonlight between the Sacramento and Mount Shasta is one of the prominent memories of a lifetime. No patriotic attachment is demanded to make the Californian say with the Irishman that his country's full-moon is twice as large and splendid as any other's. Phenomenally, at least, the bare facts support him.

At noon of the day on which we left the American Ranch, we came up a rugged hill into the settlement of Shasta. This town is a mining depot of some importance, chiefly memorable to us for some excellent pie, made out of the California apple-melon, in wonderful imitation of the Eastern green-apple tart, and a charge of five dollars and a half in gold made by the great Californian Express Company for bringing Bierstadt's color-box (heavy as a small valise) from Red Bluffs, whither we had let it go on by boat. Why this should have left a memorable impression on our minds it would be hard to say; for, although the demand was somewhat more than the stage employed by the Express Company would have charged to take either one of us the same distance, accompanied by a heavy trunk, we should by this time have acquired sufficient familiarity with extortion from the Company's officials to have paid very quietly a bill of fifty dollars for the same service, and then dismissed the trifling matter from our minds. But indignation at swindles is sometimes cumulative.

At the town of Shasta we left the main wagon-road,--finding that it passed a long way from the most important point on our itinerary, the base of Shasta Peak. By striking across the country six miles to the small settlement of Buckeye, we intersected a route little travelled, but far more picturesque, and leading directly to the great object of our longings. On the way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacramento, here dwindled to a narrow mountain-stream, with bold precipitous banks and a rock bottom, a smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of trout and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and climbed the steeps on the other side, but did not leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak we were never out of its neighborhood.

By this _detour_ of ours we came into a country better wooded and watered than any through which we had been travelling. When the sun left us, we found the moonlight so seductive that we pushed on late into the evening,--making our all-night halt at a ranch-man's whose name had been given us by some passing native, who praised his accommodations unboundedly, but proved much more of a friend to him than to ourselves. It is a duty to visit the afflicted. It is a misfortune, not a crime, to have a wife and six children, the latter all under twelve years of age. It is a still greater and no less irresponsible calamity to have them all prostrated by chills-and-fever, yet forbidden to yield to its depressing influence by the stimulus of several million healthy fleas. Ignorance, not wilfulness, may be at the causal bottom of a batch of bread which is half saleratus, and a stew of venerable hens which is one-third feathers. Nor can we regard it as other than a beneficent arrangement in the grand scheme of Nature's laws, that a pack of noble hounds should pass the hours of slumber around our humble casement in the free indulgence of a liberty distinctly authorized by the sacred Watts as follows,--

"_Let_ dogs delight to bark," etc.

Still, I think public opinion will sustain me in the view that the much afflicted family were not agreeable to pass the night with.

This is the place for a useful financial statement. Everything on our present trip cost a dollar. Bed for one, i. e. one's share of a bed for two,--supper,--each horse's forage,--breakfast,--every several item, a dollar. No matter how afflicted the family, saleratusy the bread, loud the dogs,--nothing was furnished under the dollar. When people happen to have enough dollars, this becomes comic. It reminded us of the Catskill Mountain House, where in specie-times everything (after hotel-bills) was twenty-five cents,--from getting a waiter to look at you, to having the Falls tipped up for you.

The day's journey between the afflicted family and Dog Creek, where we stopped the third night, is such an affluent remembrance of beauty that I feel glad while I write about it. We started under circumstances somewhat tedious. Nobody was going toward Mount Shasta with so much as a pack-mule. The father of the afflicted family labored under the blight of his surroundings, and after severe thought gave up the task of attempting to recall when anybody _had_ been going toward Mount Shasta. It was also too much for him to calculate when anybody would be going. We paid him his dollars,--wished that his shadow might never be less, which it couldn't very well, unless the ague can dance on a mathematical line,--and set out with the color-box carried alternately before us on our pommels. It had been our _bete noire_ from the time five dollars and fifty cents ransomed it at Shasta. We now began to wonder whether the Express Company also had carried it on a pommel,--in which case we thought we could forgive the Express Company. The morning was sultry, and as we started our horses forth upon a walk,--for the box could not stand jolting,--we looked forward to a tiresome day.

As we went on, Nature seemed determined to kiss us out of the sulks. Just as we broke into fresh grumbles, which we wanted to indulge, and our horses into fresh trots, which we desired, but could not tolerate, we entered some lovely glen, musical with tinkling springs, its walling banks tapestried with the richest velvet of deep-green grass, brocaded with spots of leaf-filtered sunshine. When we began to swelter, we came into the dense shadow of great oaks, or caught the balmiest wind in the world through aromatic pine and cedar vistas along the crown of some lofty ridge. It was impossible to be vexed with the step-mother, Fate, when the fingers of our mother, Nature, were straying through our hair. To drive away the last elf of ill-humor, and make us thenceforth agree to regard the box as an ornamental appendage which we were good-natured enough to let each other enjoy by turns. Pitt River, the last fork of the Upper Sacramento, came glancing into our landscape, the very perfection of fluent freedom and gladness. Every rod of the journey along its west bank disclosed a new picture. The misty blue mountains of the range toward Shasta Peak formed the abiding background of every view. Steep, fir-battlemented banks of one generic form, but endless variety in the beauty of the tree forms and groups which rose from their _glacis_, mile after mile, framed in some new loveliness of light-and-shadow-flecked bend, deep sepia-dark pool, singing shallow, or brawling rapid of the clear stream. Eagles were sailing, like a placid thought in a large heart, far over our heads in the intimacy of a spotless sky; the great ground-squirrel flashed like a gray gleam over the gnarled mossy roots at the side of our narrow dug-way; and in brilliant blots or darting shafts of Magenta fire, we recognized among the tree-tops that loveliest bird of the North-American forest, the great crested woodpecker. Here and there, to introduce a human element, came cleared spaces by the river's brink, where pointed wands stood impaling flakes of red salmon-flesh,--the open-air curing-house and out-door store-room of the Pitt-River Indians. Once in the course of the day we lighted on a picturesque ragged hut, where the purveyors of this meat were soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight,--where little savages of every degree of gauntness in their limbs, ochriness on their cheeks, shockiness in their heads, and protuberance in their abdomens, were gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral _embonpoint_,--where white men, lower than the lowest Diggers they herded with, had forgotten the little they ever knew of civilization, and stood glaring at us like half-sated Satyrs as we passed. Other bits of _genre_ hourly came into the picture with pappoose-carrying squaws who hunted yew-berries along the road-side fringe of woods, youngsters wearing no attire but a party-colored acorn-basket of deft finger-work, which they carried loaded on their shoulders, or listlessly trailed empty at their sides. Dr. Prichard has some hideous pictures of Papuans and Australians; but if Ethnology were a match-game, we could give him those two points, and beat him easily by playing a few of the Digger women whom we saw that day. They reached the ugliness of aboriginal specimens which we had encountered on the west verge of the Goshoot country; and if any earthly pilgrimage, short of the mountains of Nightmare, can reveal _their_ rivals, I should like to get into a prime state of health and be allowed a peep at them through a spy-glass.

The condition of the white men who live and make alliances with these poor creatures is too heart-sickening to print. The law that governs all associations of culture with barbarism, where the latter is in dynamic excess, holds rigorously true in California. The higher race recollects only the cultivated evil of the state whence it fell,--and carrying to its savage mates subtler means of accomplishing vice than they knew before, presently gives rise to a combination from which all the simplicity of the low race is eliminated, and into which enter all the devils of mature civilization. Nor do these devils come accompanied by a single grace or angel which softened or restrained crime in the developed community. The attachment of this region's older settlers for their savage comrades is something incredible. To enjoy their society they cheerfully embrace a life as impure, uncleanly, free from all humanizing influences, as that of the lowest Digger with whom they consort. Sometimes a strange incongruous romance, like moonlight on a puddle, lights up these mongrel _liaisons_, and infuses into them a burlesque of sentiment. We found one old hunter whose squaw ran away from him into the mountains at regular six-months' intervals, and who invariably spent hundreds of dollars and no end to hardships in hunting her up and restoring her to his wigwam. Another, who had kept an Indian seraglio from the time of the earliest gold-discoveries, had repeatedly been to the nearest legal officer, (two or three days' journey off,) and besought him, without effect, to marry him to one of his squaws in Christian fashion. It certainly did seem hard that the poor fellow should be forbidden to make the only reparation in his power for wrongs of twelve years' standing; but the aesthetic, naturally enough to those who have seen Diggers, predominated over the legal and moral in the judicial mind, and he was finally sent away with an injunction never to show his face again while "this court continued to know herself" in the Shasta region.

As often happens in the discipline of human life, the thorn in the flesh was withdrawn as soon as we had learned the lesson of bearing it resignedly. At the last crossing of the Sacramento, we learned from the ferryman that a providential wagoner was just ahead of us, going certainly to Dog Creek, and presumably, if we made it an object, all the way to Strawberry Valley, at the foot of Shasta. The one whose turn it was not to carry the color-box galloped ahead, and detained the wagoner until the heavy dragoon had time to come up. With a deep sigh of relief, we stowed our box in the "prairie-schooner,"--made a contract to have it packed on mule-back from Dog Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one among a gross of cheap watches which we had brought for trade with Indians and Trappers,--and, relieving our horses by the first canter they had enjoyed that day, sped away with the deep conviction that the man who first called chrome and white-lead _light_ colors must have been indulging the subtile irony of a diseased mind.

The seven miles of our journey from the last Sacramento crossing to Dog Creek were even grander in their scenery than our morning stage. The road was a dug-way from one to seven hundred feet above the base of a winding castellated cliff, here and there cut in rugged sandstone, but often both walled and buttressed with steep slopes of virgin turf kept emerald by innumerable trickling springs, ice-cold and crystal-clear, while here and there it passed through woods as dark as twilight. The slope on which we travelled formed one side of a valley, green at its bottom as a New-England meadow, and watered by a picturesque affluent of the Sacramento. About dark we came to the Dog-Creek Ranch, where we had such a delicious supper of trout, cooked in the good old Green-Mountain fashion with an Indian-meal night-gown on, as made us "forget the steps already trod," followed by a really nice _pair_ of beds, wherein we took long and ample preparation to "onward urge our way" upon the morrow.